Prof. Robert E. Norton

Research activities in Halle

Evening lecture « Schiller und das Problem des handelnden Menschen: Max Kommerell als Psychologe », IZEA, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 18 June, 2019.

Lecture « Enlightenment Now? About Steven Pinker: Enlightenment Now (2018) » as part of the workshop Lumières – Enlightenment – Aufklärung – Illuminismo. Critical readings / Lectures critiques / Kritische Auseinandersetzungen. Halle (Saale), IZEA, 27-28 June, 2019.

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Curriculum Vitae and research interests

Specializing in 18th-20th Century German Literature and Philosophy, Aesthetics, Ethics, Political Thought, and Intellectual History, Norton’s published books are Secret Germany. Stefan George and His Circle (Cornell, 2002); The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century (Cornell, 1995); Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (Cornell, 1991); translated books: Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology (Illinois, 2009); Ulrich Ricken, Linguistics, Anthropology, and Philosophy in the French Enlightenment; (Routledge, 1994).

He just completed a book monograph on The Crucible of German Democracy.  Ernst Troeltsch and the First World War.

He has also written articles on Gottsched, Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, George Eliot, Stefan George, Thomas Mann, Rudolf Alexander Schroeder, Otto Baumgarten, Ernst Troeltsch, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Isaiah Berlin, Robert Schneider, the German appropriation of Greece, physiognomy, postmodernism, secularization, language philosophy, the myth of the Counter-Enlightenment.

Norton’s selected honors are Jacques Barzun Prize for Cultural History; Ungar German Translation Award; Guggenheim Fellowship; Humboldt Fellowship; American Philosophical Society Research Grant; Senior Fellowship Forschungsbund Marbach Weimar Wolfenbüttel; Elected Fellow at Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford; Research Grant at Internationale Forschungsstätte, Europäische Aufklärung, Halle; Whiting Fellowship; Germanistic Society of America Fellowship; Fulbright Grant.

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